The question has been asked and answered ad infinitum. But in this generation of sound bites and short attention spans, it will go on for as long as the Columbus kid who went to Michigan still plays basketball for the Wolverines.

Especially today, when Trey Burke returns home as arguably the best point guard in college basketball, at the helm of the nation’s No. 2-ranked team.

The question, of course, is this: Why isn’t Burke, who is best friends and played at Northland High School with Jared Sullinger, playing for Ohio State?

The answer: He had no choice. The Buckeyes never offered him a scholarship.

But Thad Matta wasn’t the only coach who didn’t.

“Let’s be honest: People just missed on the kid,” said Reggie Rankin, a former City League star, like Burke. Rankin played at Linden and Ohio University, was a major-college assistant coach for a number of years and now is a recruiting analyst forESPN.com.

“I thought he would be a really good college player,” Rankin said. “Did I think he’d be the best point guard in the country like he is now? I didn’t.”

Burke will play in Value City Arena today for the second time as a Wolverine. Last year, the Buckeyes had a national player of the year candidate in Sullinger, were ranked higher (fourth, to Michigan’s 20th) and won 64-49. This year, the roles are reversed.

Michigan is now the only undefeated team remaining in major-college basketball, and Burke was second to Duke’s Mason Plumlee last week in a national player of the year straw poll of media by ESPN.com. He averages 18.2 points, third in the Big Ten, and ranks among the top 10 nationally in assists and assist-to-turnover ratio.

So far, it has been the season Burke hoped for last spring when he chose to forgo the NBA draft after his freshman season and return to the Wolverines. It’s more than he could have hoped for, actually. After he put a half-spin move on Nebraska on Wednesday that he copied years ago from NBA All-Star Chris Paul, Paul tweeted Burke a compliment. The two met at Paul’s skills camp last summer.

“I’m definitely kind of surprised by the way my life has changed the last year or so,” Burke said. “But I knew that, just by the grace of God and by staying humble, and (with) hard work, I could be at this point eventually.”

He was among a minority with that belief.

In 2009, after his sophomore year of high school, Burke was not ranked among the top 100 recruits in his class. Like many children in central Ohio, he grew up an Ohio State fan, and after two Northland teammates, Sullinger and J.D. Weatherspoon, committed to the Buckeyes, he said, “That made me want to go there even more.”

But Matta — who was close to getting a commitment from a higher-ranked point guard from Georgia, Shannon Scott — never made Burke an offer. When Penn State did so that October, Burke grabbed it.

“I was kind of excited by my first Big Ten offer, my first major offer,” he said.

He envisioned himself being the next Talor Battle. But that winter, he thought more about the difficulty he would have dealing with losing at Penn State and whether the coaches who recruited him even would be there when he arrived. In May 2010, he rescinded his commitment and reopened his recruitment.

By mid-October, a few weeks before the November signing period began, he was close to making a commitment to Cincinnati. But he procrastinated, holding out hope of hearing from a Big Ten school. Iowa wanted him, but it was too far away from home. Finally, Michigan answered his prayer.

A consensus of the final rankings of the 2011 recruiting class did not place Burke among the top 100 players. ESPN.com rated him the highest: the No. 15 point guard and No. 84 overall.

Burke’s father, Benji, who coached his son in the All-Ohio Red AAU program, said evaluators missed the boat.

“In the summers, all the five-star (recruits), all the McDonald’s All-Americans, if he didn’t outplay them, he played with them. But when the rankings came out, he never moved up,” Benji Burke said. “The reasoning for that, from what the evaluators say, is that they try to all stay in the same ballpark. ‘I can’t move him up to the top 50 if the others have him at 150.’

“All that stuff made him work harder,” Benji said, “so he could say, ‘Hey, I belong.’ ”

Rankin said some were unsure how pure a point guard Burke was because he was a scorer first and setup man second on the AAU circuit.

“To his credit, he’s honed his skills into being an elite point guard,” Rankin said. “I think he is the closest thing there is to Chris Paul right now. He never gets rattled; he’s never in a hurry. He’s like a surgeon: He just takes his time and dissects you.”

Maybe the better question to ask about Burke now is, had he come to Ohio State, would he be the player he has become at Michigan? With Aaron Craft here before him, Burke might still be coming off the bench like Scott. At Michigan, Darius Morris left for the NBA just as Burke was arriving.

“I’m glad it happened the way it did. It was a blessing,” Benji Burke said. “Not every kid can go to the right school at the right time. Trey went to the right fit at the right time.”